General Melancthon S. Wade 1861 - 1865

James Presley Ball, Sr. created this photographic print of General Melancthon S. Wade. Ball was an African-American photographer. He began his career as an artist working with daguerreotypes. Ball's career coincided with the Civil War and its aftermath, a period of immense social upheaval. Against this backdrop, consider the implications of an African-American artist producing a portrait of a Union General. What does it mean to have a Black artist framing the image of a white military leader? Ball’s studio in Cincinnati was known for its grand interiors which offered a theatrical setting for staging photographs of both Black and white middle-class subjects. Photographs such as this one exist as important visual documents of a fraught historical moment, capturing the complex relationships between race, representation, and power in 19th-century America. The role of the historian is to look at these issues, using primary resources and studying the cultural context of the time to understand the work more fully.